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Marketing Lessons For The New Web: Four Success Tips

For today’s marketers, online channels present a vast array of new opportunity – as well as the potential for costly distraction. New and emerging platforms — such as social and mobile channels — continue to evolve the online landscape of consumer engagement. As a result, success metrics and economics can change quarterly depending upon customer adoption curves. Marketers can, and should, choose from a broad menu of customer connection points. But there are endless permutations of online brand building, customer sourcing and repeat driving levers. Which should companies pursue?

There’s also a caveat: Investing early in new applications and platforms can be risky – drawing both time and funds. For example, you may take the plunge and allocate significant resources toward building up a social coupon campaign. While this may have worked for brand X, you might find that your high-cost new customers are more interested in finding the next deal than repeating a purchase.

It can be challenging to find what sticks. Here are my top four tips on building a successful, sustainable campaign online.

1. Build your base. Core acquisition and retention programs are an online marketer’s bread and butter. Before diving right into the latest, hottest marketing trend and investing in emerging channels, it’s critical to build a strong customer base. To do this, it’s important to focus on margin-positive vehicles – or pay-for-performance ones. Filtering revenue through channels such as targeted e-mail, paid search, affiliate networks and CPA partnerships are proven ways to develop a core customer base. From here, you can use additional, more experimental, vehicles to help drive repeats and referrals.

2. Watch the trends before diving in. The highest impact campaigns use the foundation built by performance programs to leverage emerging arenas and amplify reach. However, it can be difficult to identify which channels will help you do this. My advice — tap into broad social trends. Major trends, like smartphone use, carry direct impact over the way consumers shop and engage. Think social media for customer retention and branding vs. customer partnerships for quantifiable CPA expansion.

For example, mobile trends have opened up new opportunities for reaching consumers. Online marketers can use the mobile platform to message outside of the conventional workday. Customers can choose to engage at their leisure – whether it’s during their commute time, in the evenings or on the weekends. In addition, we can deliver timely, relevant offers with mobile device-delivered promotions (looking for that perfect Father’s Day gift – today!? We can help!).

Although the core offering stays the same, how that message is delivered changes with available channels.

3. Make sure you’re listening and aggregate feedback. When developing strategies to amplify reach, remember: Your customers will tell you what to do, you just have to make sure you’re listening. When it’s easy, they tell you directly. But too often they let you know indirectly through defection. Mining all of the ways your customers talk to you can deliver valuable actionable acquisition and retention programs.

At Wine.com, we solicit feedback/reviews and use surveys to listen and engage with customers. Additionally, our full-time community manager – a seasoned expert on social channels and accredited wine connoisseur – is on point to surface and address customer feedback across all online channels. Along with the tracked feedback, these learnings are shared throughout the team. Ultimately, we synthesize the feedback into actionable product changes and marketing campaigns.

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